Customer call centers, or simply, “call centers,” are often the first point of contact for customers seeking direct assistance from manufacturers and service vendors. Customer calls are sometimes recorded for quality control, call statistics, and other uses. Customer call recordings provide important feedback to a call center and can be used to improve the call center business. Call recordings can be reviewed to assess an agent's performance, to ensure that a particular sales script is followed, to resolve customer complaints, and to analyze problems with the call center system. The call recordings can also be played for new employees during a training class.
Call centers often receive large volumes of calls from customers seeking assistance or with other needs. FIG. 1 is a functional block diagram showing a prior art call center environment. The call center 10 includes an interactive voice response (IVR) system 17, automatic call distributor (ACD) 13, and agents 14 that provide customer assistance over online terminals. The call center 10 also includes a database 18 to archive customer call recordings.
Operationally, a customer 11 calls into the call center via a telephone 12. The call is received by the ACD 13 and assigned to one of the agents 14 or the IVR 17, which guides the customer 11 into an area of assistance, such as through a caller option tree. The agents 14 can also coordinate with the IVR 17 to provide information to the customer 11. The agents 14 can interact with a legacy system 16 for order fulfillment processing. A call center supervisor 15 manages the agents 14 over a supervisory terminal to ensure that the agents 14 are correctly and efficiently performing their jobs. After the customer interaction is complete, a recording of each call is stored in the database 18.
Saving every call recording indefinitely entails significant storage overhead, especially for call centers with large caller volumes. Conversely, new call recordings cannot be stored until storage space becomes available, which can force the deletion of call recordings of potential importance. FIG. 2 is a line graph showing, by way of example, hypothetical call recording storage consumption. The x-axis 22 represents a number of call recordings stored. The y-axis 21 represents the amount of available storage space. The database is progressively and steadily filled as every call recording is saved over time. Once full, saved call recordings must be deleted to make room for the new recordings, as the total amount of storage space remains finite. However, wholesale call recording deletion generally non-selectively erases all calls, regardless of content, relevance, importance, or the other retention criteria. Thus, call centers routinely only retain the call recordings over predetermined time intervals, dependent on caller volume and available storage space.
Many of the stored call recordings, such as routine or informational calls, can remain in the database without further review. Storing these call recordings needlessly occupies storage space, as calls that are not further reviewed need not be saved. However, even without the unneeded calls, the amount of available storage space can be rapidly filled.
Locating a single call recording or a group of call recordings can be complicated by large databases, which generally lack indexing for call retrieval by context or nature. Rather, call recordings are often stored and identified by time and date. Thus, searching for a particular call can be frustrating and time-consuming and as the number of call recordings in the database increases, finding a call recording becomes increasingly difficult.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that reduces call recording storage overhead and which facilitates call retrieval by selectively saving calls based upon specific criteria.